Any DJ, music producer or mixer who knows his music knows the Impulse! label, which helped burn jazz into the public consciousness in the 1960s and early 1970s. Even today you can often catch Impulse's striking black-and-orange album covers peeping out of DJ record crates, with Impulse samples popping up on the freshest dance-floor grooves.

The spiritual home of saxophonist John Coltrane, who helped define the label from 1961 through to his death in 1967, Impulse! was also host to other gods in the jazz pantheon including Charles Mingus, Gil Evans, Sonny Rollins and Duke Ellington. If you wanted to know what was going on in jazz in the 1960s, you checked out Impulse! first. Today, the label's back catalogue is more exciting and adventurous than anything current in American jazz.

As Ashley Kahn points out in his compelling new history, it was Coltrane's creative drive that propelled the label along its experimental path. Presentation was all: each album exuded class, the brainchild of producer Creed Taylor who founded the label. He spent twice the going rate on sleeves, using top portrait photographers, expensive gatefold covers, lengthy explanatory liner notes and plenty of photos from the sessions.

Each album was conceived as a complete musical experience with what many thought was insane detail being paid to sound quality, which is why the music sounds so fresh today.

The Impulse! catalogue now rests with Universal/Vivendi who have released tie-ins to go with the book including a 4-CD set also titled The House That Trane Built. It provides a solid representation of the label's output from 1961 through to 1976 when a succession of determined producers left their imprint, none more so than Bob Thiele, who guided the label from 1961 to the middle of 1969 and whose close personal relationship with Coltrane made the saxophonist the label's standard bearer.

While most labels remain hot for just a few years, Impulse! delivered cutting-edge jazz for a decade and a half. In an industry that often resorts to formula, Impulse went from straight-ahead offerings of high quality jazz to head banging experimentalism. It says all you need to know about the label that these albums remain as controversial now as on the day they were made.